Following lady love Heather’s death, Daniel was looking for a fresh start on Young and Restless, and he found it in music, learning guitar from Tessa (Cait Fairbanks). Now he’s been persuaded to play the instrument to accompany Tessa as they perform during Danny and Christine’s wedding reception in the November 24 episode. However, portrayer Michael Graziadei, who has been playing guitar in real life since he was 13, told Soap Opera Digest that he was initially reluctant to bring his hobby to the screen.
The Music Man
Daniel never showed any musical inclination during Graziadei’s previous run on Y&R, which lasted from 2004 until 2013, but when he returned to the soap in 2022, head writer and executive producer Josh Griffith was intrigued by the thought of incorporating the actor’s real-life talent into his character. “Honestly, it’s something that Josh had brought up to me a while back when I first came back on the show,” Graziadei reports, “and he was like, ‘Hey, are you interested in playing music?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know, it’s kind of a thing [just] for me,’” he explains.
Hot for Teacher: Daniel wanted to do more than just make beautiful music with Tessa (Cait Fairbanks).
Griffith was understanding and let it go. “And then this came about,” the actor says, referring to the storyline he’s now been playing for the last several months in which Daniel develops feelings for Tessa, a married woman. In order to bring the characters together, Griffith came up with the idea of Daniel taking music lessons from Tessa, who was already established to be a gifted guitarist. When he pitched the concept to Graziadei, the actor says, “He was like, ‘I want to do this thing, but we’re gonna have you learning the guitar.”
That was an idea Graziadei could get behind. “I was like, ‘That’s actually kind of fun and kind of interesting, and it will be a challenge for me to sound like I suck at the guitar.’ So I was into it.” And since Daniel was a novice at the instrument, he adds, “It felt like there was no pressure.”
Ultimately, the actor is happy that he signed on to lend his musical skills to his character. “It’s been a rewarding experience,” he says of playing guitar on the soap, “because it is something that I’ve always kind of more kept for me, kept to myself, and now, I’m getting to share it a little bit with people, and everybody’s interested.” He learned that back in August, when he attended the show’s fan club luncheon. “That was everybody’s question: ‘You really play the guitar, though, don’t you?’”
Graziadei laughs as he adds that “Daniel seemed to progress fairly quickly,” but admits that it was actually quite challenging to act like he didn’t already know how to play the guitar when Daniel first picked up the instrument, “because you’ve trained yourself, and there’s just muscle memory and everything that goes into it for all of these years that you just know how to do it. That’s why I thought it was kind of fun, because I had to trick myself into figuring out how to mess up chords and have improper fingering technique on the fret board and whatever it is — even if it’s knocking the guitar out of tune so it sounds bad.”
